WOOD That girl I didn't love, then because she was going to leave me, loved, that girl, that Sunday when I stopped by and she was in bed in her nightgown, (it only came to me later that somebody else had just then been with her), that girl, when my hand touched her stomach, under her nightgown, began turning her stomach to wood-I hadn't known this could be done, that girls, that humans, could do this-then, when her stomach was wood, she began turning the rest of herself to perhaps something harder, steel, or harder; perhaps she was turning herself: her entire, once so soft self: to some unknown mineral substance found only on other very far planets, planets with chemical storms and vast, cold ammonia oceans of ice, and I just had to pretend-I wasn't taking this lightly, I wasn't a kid- that I wasn't one of those odd, potato-shaped moons with precarious orbits, then-it was Sunday, though I don't recall bells-I was out, in the street, and where is she now, dear figment, dear fragment, where are you now, in your nightgown, in your bed, steel and wood? Dear steel, dear wood. shrunken city. Huge areas indicated by round green blotches would be con- verted to parks and green space. All of the blotches covered areas instan- taneously recognizable to New Orlea- nians as primarily black areas. Oliver Thomas, the lumbering, emotional president of the city council and a native of the Lower Nine, led the opposition to a geographically smaller city. "To say you're not going to :fix this community or that community-you're not honor- ing the dead!" he told a crowded coun- cil chamber on the evening of Janu- ary 6th. The room erupted in applause. Before Katrina, sixty per cent of homes in the Lower Nine were owned by the people who lived in them-a higher percentage than in the city as a whole- and Thomas was eager to help his con- stituents protect the one thing of which they were sure: that property rights are sacred, and that they owned a city lot. Those who wanted a smaller footprint waited all fall and winter for the federal government to relieve them of the bur- den of fighting for it. FEMA was set to release, for the first time since 1984, new guidelines for maps that would show what parts of the city the federal government would insure against floods. The maps were expected to rule out cer- - C. K Williams tain areas and thus cut through the racial politics. Proponents talked excitedly about the "discipline" they hoped the maps would impose-the city-planning equivalent of ' Wait till your father gets home!" Sean Reilly, a member of Governor Blanco's statewide recovery authority, told me that New Orleans's obsession with neighborhoods was dangerous in the context of the bigger hurricanes pre- dicted by atmospheric scientists. 'When you say 'neighborhood,' it's become po- litically and racially charged," he said, the day we met in the office of his family's national billboard-advertising company, in Baton Rouge. The White House had just approved $6.2 billion for housing, and Reilly wanted the state to withhold it from any place that was too low-lying. 'We should talk about blocks and elevations, not neighborhoods, so we can talk about people rebuilding out of harm's way." Reilly, a red-haired man in his forties who likes to call himself "Mr. Tough Love," showed me a poster- size satellite photograph of New Or- leans at the height of the flood, color- coded according to water depth. He ran his hand over the darkest areas, which included a sliver of the Lower Nine. 'We're not going to allow rebuilding where it's unsafe. We know what the FEMA maps are going to say. They will make some decisions. Certain places are obviously unsafe to build." N either Nagin's nor Blanco's com- mission had any real authority, ex- cept to make recommendations. But, in a city desperate for direction and leader- ship, the media reported every notion that the commissions discussed. Ideas poured forth in a dizzying torrent: scram- ble the neighborhoods; ban building in the hardest-hit areas; make the city smaller; impose a three-year moratorium on building; no, three months; no, one month; no, forget the moratorium and let neighborhoods organize themselves, but, if too few return after a year, pull the plug on services. The debates were hard to follow, especially for citizens evacu- ated to Houston or Atlanta. The process paralyzed those trying to make decisions about damaged homes, and exacerbated their sense of exclusion. "It's like some- one coming to totally redecorate your home, and they don't talk to you. You feel raped, violated," the pollster Silas Lee said. "First, nature violated them, then the bureaucracy and planning pro- cess. If the commissions had understood that you're not just physically rebuilding but emotionally rebuilding, they'd be achieving something now instead of deadlocked." If ever a city needed a voice of broth- erhood, it was New Orleans after Ka- trina. Noone could find the right words, including the city's powerful clergymen. When I visited the First Baptist Church on Canal Boulevard, which has about a thousand congregants, mostly white, its blue-eyed and flinty pastor, the Rever- end David Crosby, told me, "There is nothing left in the Lower Ninth Ward but dirt! A woman who has a house down there, what's she got? A piece of dirt worth two or three thousand dol- lars." During a Sunday service at Wat- son Memorial Teaching Ministries, on St. Charles Avenue, the Reverend Tom Watson, a scholarly-looking Mrican- American who subsequently challenged N agin in this year's race for mayor, al- ternately scolded his congregants for their mistrust ("You have to ask your- self, am I involved in something that would be divisive in my community?") and stoked it ("I believe there is a sys- THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 21, 2006 53